Having spared you all the annoying details in the interim, I thought I'd update just before we move in. We get possession tomorrow and will move on Thursday of this week. Things have gone ok, we did the house inspection on Thursday of last week and there were more than a few issues - some of the wood is stained wrong totally, a major flaw; the dishwasher has white trim rather than black; there's a mirrored door where there shouldn't be and a few other trivial fixing up points.

We did also manage to sell off our other house quite quickly and for a very nice price, so this move won't be too painful, at least until the bills for new appliances and the like roll in. I'm also contemplating a newer TV for the family room, something I hadn't planned on, but the current Panasonic has developed an annoying buzz, so get a "cheap" 32 flat screen (Samsung or Philips) or spring for the big bucks for an LCD or Plasma. I just don't think the latter is really necessary given we'll eventually be putting a projector in the basement. Opinions?

It will be a long time though before I have a room for all my crap. We don't have any family here in town, so everyone comes to visit and we've been wanting to have a couple of spare rooms, so now we will, but I can't make one into a toy room without affecting that. So it's about waiting until the basement is done.

Still plenty of work left to do on the house exterior, we're waiting for the driveway and walkway to be paved; the stucco to go on and then get our properly colored garage and front doors installed. They also have to do a final grading of the lot before we can start on the deck, fencing and landscaping, so we'll be living in mud for probably a month or three

Anyway, the finished product....

Looking in from the front door:

Up the stairs again (the reference photo for me):

Dining room:

Living room:

Living room looking back to the front foyer:

The kitchen, soon to be home to stainless appliances:

Family room, complete with surround sound hookup

Speaking of which - ooooooh...

Main floor powder room:

Looking down those stairs:

No new pics of the upstairs, the bedrooms haven't changed too much, aside from having doors and closet doors. Bathrooms have been finished up, including the jetted tub in the master bath Sort of hard to take pics of those rooms as well, because you don't get the same opportunity without the open spaces.

As for the TV, if you're going all out for a projector in the basement, I'd say buy something that's "middle of the road" price-wise, like a LCD- or DLP-projection. You'll spend more than on a "cheap" CRT TV, but in the long run you'll probably be happier, especially if you've got the setup for a nice sound system. Just my 2 cents.

Congrats on the new home and best wishes. The place looks great. I have a Vizio 50 Plasma that they sell at Costco and Sams Club for a measely $2299. The set is an incredible value if you decide to go this route.

Read all about this set here. When you ready to hook up a wall shaking system to that projector let me know.

That is a beautiful home Brent, congratulations to you and your family on that. I'm sure you guys are anxious to get in there, and have the big move overwith. Everything looks great, and I hope you get an area for your collection sooner than later . Very nice, I hope we can afford something like that someday.

Well.......... it sort of depends what you mean by progress? I'm still collecting, yes, but it's really not terribly much fun at this point. The reason being that everything just comes home and goes into a box. Take a look at this shot in the basement:

Now that's not all my stuff, but it's sort of representative because you can't see what goes in behind those boxes in front. I decided to do a pretty substantial reduction of stuff recently and went through all of my boxes and rubbermaid tubs. On the right side, appearing below the shuttle are my 11 long boxes of comics I'd dearly like to unload, but we all know what that market is like. They are sitting on a pallet that's about 5 feet by 5 feet. For the rest of my stuff, boxes and tubs included, there are three other pallets of the same size they are resting on and then you get the vertical component, about six feet in height. So I have about 1350 cubic feet of crap, not including the comics

As mentioned, the stuff in front is just other rubbermaid tubs of stuff. I've reduced my collection a fair bit and will probably do another serious culling of the Hasbro stuff. Of late, like many others it seems, I've just sort of lost interest to a degree. I've put much of it up for sale over at snowtroopers.ca (no offense to anyone here, but I'm trying to reclaim retail pricing on a lot of it and Canadian retail is way higher than you guys would be willing to pay, even after exchange rate is factored in - you're all welcome, but your jaws would probably drop at some prices). Mostly I just decided to get rid of a lot of multiples of figures I had carded for no real reason (loose collector), cull back my armies to about the size of a single squad, unload some duplicate (triplicate) ships and the like. I still like the 3.75" scale a lot, but I don't need a lot of what I have. I'm finding it hard to swallow paying $45 CAD for a new Snowspeeder, primarily for the pack in figure, when for the same price I could pick up a decent, boxed, vintage Snowspeeder and be done with it. Granted it wouldn't be mint, but I could cease worrying about repacks.

I'm contemplating reducing the collection even further, including many of the ships/vehicles I have. I'm just not certain any longer that I need to own 4-5 different X-wings. I do have the OTC versions of Slave I, Falcon, X-wing/Tie (Costco) but skipped Vader's Tie, regretably. I may keep those, but think I may unload many of the other versions, pack in figures be damned. Similarly I have the first two (non clone wars) versions of the gunships up for sale as well at regular Canadian retail as I'm keeping the CW version alone. I'm not opposed to new stuff necessarily, but I don't feel like I want all of it right now. I'll also probably reduce the loose figures a bit and any of the remaining carded figures, save a few. Basically Hasbro just isn't holding my interest lately The other stuff may be more pricey, but in the end I spend a lot less by not army building, ordering online and not wasting gas and just by buying less stuff overall. I'll probably cull my McFarlane stuff a bit further as well, but there isn't nearly as much work to do there as one would think. Marvel Legends are for the most part fine as I've been largely selective with it anyway.

It's also been quite nice to take in money instead of pushing it out. I've sold off nearly $1000 already and estimate of what's left on the initial list is another $1500 or so. I think I could find another $1000 pretty darn quickly too and that's about half way to a Harley. My best friend and best man at my wedding (Duane, for those who've met him) rides motorcycles and is planning on getting a Harley soon. My wife would also love to have one as she grew up riding motorcycles. So I get to reduce the collection, store up some cash and maybe get a bike out of it That's of course if I don't go off and start spending money on silly things like a Sacul Kubrick or some boxed/carded vintage stuff

The big motivations for it are two-fold: 1. you see the picture, how much fun is that? Look at the picture below, the Veers Kubrick is out because I'd already boxed up series 6 and didn't want to dig it out, so there he sits with a couple of friends. 2. we won't be finishing the basement all that quickly it seems and reasonably so. Good chunk of change to do it and to be perfectly honest, the house is big enough we don't have any real need aside from a "collection room" for me. We have two spare bedrooms, a family room, a living room and a den where we could let people sleep. The family room is wired for 5.1 and while the tv is only 32", there's not much need for more right now. I still plan on going with 6.1 and a projector in the basement when we get around to it, but there isn't much rush. My kid is way happier outdoors and I'm not going to argue that at all.

On top of that, I'm not really strongly motivated by Hasbro's SDCC announcements. There's some really cool stuff there, no doubt about it, but so many rehashes/repaints or single figures in pack sets that it's not worth the money to me. I'm more impressed by Gentle Giant these days with both busts and bust ups. Frankly the bust ups are nicer to me than the Hasbro 3.75" figures these days as is. I'm just sort of moving towards higher end stuff I guess. So it all ends with a decreased interest in Hasbro. I really enjoy looking at Scott/OCB's stuff, it's simple and not overdone. As impressive as Rob's collection is, I can't do that so I'm leaning away from hasbro basically.

As for what's currently on display, this covers it

Pretty sad, eh? And a crappy picture to boot That's sitting on top of the bookcase that holds half of our DVDs. I'm thinking of putting more stuff up there, primarily putting out the Kubricks and the vintage collection, if only to get them out of storage. But the rest of it is doomed to the basement for some time. Prior to building the room downstairs I don't have much interest in putting stuff out, only to pack it up during construction again.

Suffice to say it's not overly motivating for collecting these days.

As for the house itself, it's doing alright. We've had to wait for several things for what seems like a long time, but given what I know about some others (hey Drew) we've had a pretty short wait really. The biggest pain has been moving from a house with a pool to a house that's sitting on mud during the hottest summer in quite some time. Painful. We'll hopefully get the pool dug this year and we still have to fence, build a deck and landscape the entire yard. There are also issues within the house and related to the construction of the house that we need to deal with yet, but my wife is doing an amazing job of keeping the builder in line If you guys want pics of the house furnished, let me know.